If you’re unlucky enough to have any vehicle stolen and it gets recovered, most owners end up being robbed again, this time by the police.

The police have, in most areas, joined forces (as they say) with recovery partners to cut down on the time taken to recover your vehicles, although what they don’t tell you is that the police get a kickback from every recovery they put the recovery companies on to. If your vehicle is found the police are supposed to contact you and give you adequate time to recover your vehicle in your own way, unless it’s causing an obstruction in the road, pavement, or if they fear it may be stolen again.

The get out clause for the police is that due to divisional cuts they don’t have the manpower to look after the vehicle for a reasonable amount of time, which is a guideline of 90 minutes. Most of the time they will simply phone the recovery firm and bang, its £150 for you just to get your vehicle out again today, plus £50 for each additional day. Many folks won’t have the spare cash to cover the recovery and storage after having their pride and joy nicked.

Give PACE a chance

Then you have to get into the compound, trust me it’s easier seeing a mate in prison than getting in Edgertons in Manchester. When you finally get in you’re escorted to see the vehicle but you’re not allowed to take photos of it to see what costings you can come up with as there are vehicles under investigation in there. Most of the time we are led to believe that our insurers will cover the recovery bill and storage charges. Yes, they will, most probably after two weeks and this is where the third slap in the face comes in. If it was financially viable for your vehicle to be fixed before the storage charges and recovery were added on. After they’ve been added they will most probably categorise it as a write-off, as the fees can add up to another grand for them to pay out. This usually takes it over the ceiling cost for a viable repair. However, there is a get out clause. When your vehicle is recovered by the agent ask the police and get them to record that it’s for further investigation under the PACE Acthttps://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1984/60/contents, that means it’s the full responsibility of the police for the storage charges.

Police advice

A police source told us “If you are unlucky enough to have your vehicle nicked, when you report it to the police make sure you get the call handler to endorse the log with the fact that if the vehicle is found you want to recover it yourself and NOT have it recovered by the police or agents. What happens is, if that’s not on the report, rather than leaving it where it’s found and run the risk of it getting nicked again if insecure they get it lifted to the compound.”

Owner recovery only

“They may want it for possible forensics but they can come and do that on your own drive. If its a motorcycle or scooter it is open to the elements it doesn’t always count anyway, and even then if you don’t want forensics on it, they won’t do it. So it must be stressed on the call that if found notify the owner, and owner recovery only, the only problem being if you don’t answer your phone and it’s left in situ then it could get nicked again.”

Last edited by Kestrel on Fri Aug 17, 2018 9:49 pm; edited 1 time in total (Reason for editing : Missed some of story off!)

Nice find Kestrel, but this is only part of the story as the po-lice also get another kick back from the insurers if they use a recovery agent approved by the insurer and is on their books as an approved recovery agent; but why?Insurers are businesses and have agreed deals with multiple recovery agents around the country and as such they get a heavily discounted recovery rate, lets put this into perspective, you are charged the normal domestic recovery rate of £150 for example but the discounted rate may only be £40 if the insurer authorises the recovery directly, similarly, if the domestic storage rate is £50 per day then having the insurers authorise the storage means they pay £10-15 per day storage.

Now the kick back, if the domestic rate for recovery is £150 and the trade rate for the insurers is £40 this means they get a £110 saving and the po-lice get around one third of this as a bonus and they will wait with a vehicle until the insurers approved and authorised recovery agent arrives. This means the po-lice get one third of this £110 saving as a bonus or £36.66 bonus for doing nothing.

Next we have the trading up scam by recovery agents which the po-lice also go along with, trading up means that if a vehicle is anything other than on a readily accessible road the recovery agent will come out with the smallest recovery vehicle they can which is usually a van with a flat bed fitted. They are all equipped with winches which have 100' of rope fitted to the winch (33 metres) and if your vehicle is through a hedge, down a bank, or even in a field they trot out the same excuses:

Its too far for our rope to reach as we only have 50' (16.5 metres) of rope fitted and it wont reach.Its bogged down and we can't pull it as it will overload our winch/our vehicle isn't heavy enough and will slide.We can't get into the field with this vehicle.They also use a variety of other excuses, but why.

They then claim they need a second specialist recovery vehicle which has to be approved by you or the po-lice, its basic consent and the po-lice will always consent because they aren't paying the bill and they get a greater kickback from a second recovery vehicle attending which will be much more expensive so two kickbacks from a single job, double dipping anyone. Then the recovery driver of the first recovery gets a kickback from the recovery company for calling out a so called specialist vehicle; now you have a bill of £150 for the first recovery vehicle and a second bill of £750 for the second vehicle which is usually nothing more than a lorry and it may be fitted with a larger winch with more pulling power but it still has the same 100' of rope on its winch, so your £150 bill has hit £900 and the po-lice get two kickbacks and the driver of the initial recovery truck also gets a kickback which effectively doubles his payment for that job.

How does this work? simply because nearly all recovery drivers are self employed when on recovery work and they get paid per job, if they earn £20 per recovery its pushing it as most get £15-20 per job so getting the same kickback as they are originally paid doubles their money for that job and as they are so badly paid they have to do it to earn their money. Basically they will sit at a company base and hope work comes in and if it does they get paid per job, if no work comes in they still go to work and earn nothing, so why self employed? because it gets round the minimum wage by using contractual conditions.